AllSpark
Although its physical form differs across the universal streams in which it appears, the powers and history of the AllSpark remain common across the multiverse: It is one of the fabled sacred implements, the objects capable of creating new Transformer life. Its origins are unknown, lost to the distant past, sometimes predating even Cybertron itself, but it often gives the impression that it possesses a consciousness of some kind and is either working towards a cosmic plan of its own divining, or is carrying out the will of a higher power. In truth, the physical AllSpark is but a shell to contain the incredible life-giving energies within; should that shell be destroyed, the energies will remain, as potent as ever, merely waiting for a new vessel to inhabit. Any fragments that would remain in the event of the AllSpark's physical destruction would still possess all of the incredible power that the original object did. The AllSpark's power has long been coveted by the Decepticons, ultimately requiring the Autobots to launch it into the depths of space, putting it beyond the reach of any Cybertronian. Ficiton In this universal cluster, the AllSpark takes the form of a large, metallic cube inscribed with Cyberglyphics. Sources say it was created by a nameless power for a reason, but that reason is as yet unknown... The AllSpark was responsible for creating the planet Cybertron and the first entities that inhabited it, a race of massively powerful trans-dimensional beings that became known as the Dynasty of Primes. The AllSpark sustained the planet and the Primes through its continuous generation of Energon, but the Primes soon discovered its vast power was finite, and they were at a loss on how to restore it. The answer came when a nearby star went nova, the released energy repowering the AllSpark. The Primes knew that more stars would have to be found for sacrifices in the future, and the AllSpark responded to their need by creating the Transformers, a new race of shape-changing robots to serve the Dynasty: Seekers to search for suitable stars, and Constructicons to build massive Star Harvesters to take the energy of those suns. Knowing the destructive capabilities of these harvesters, the Dynasty tempered their search with the rule to never destroy a star with a life-bearing world. The AllSpark then formed a key to activate the harvesters, the Matrix of Leadership, which the Dynasty protected. Defiance #4 In time, however, one of the Primes began to believe the AllSpark was talking to him, that it had chosen him as its acolyte. He began destroying inhabited solar systems to power the AllSpark and grew frustrated with the Dynasty's restrictions, constructing a star harvester on a primitive world on order to draw the other Dynasty into a trap, that he might kill them all. Only one Prime survived the slaughter, imprisoning the rogue Prime—forever after known as The Fallen—in his sarcophagus, before then hiding the Matrix away in a tomb made of the bodies of the dead Primes, giving his life to seal it. As the millennia rolled by, the Transformers would form a new society, and the tales of the Primes and the AllSpark would slip into legend. The cube itself was forgotten, lost beneath the surface of the planet, and without a supply of energy regularly being harvested for it, Cybertron's energy began to diminish, leading to factionalization and tribal warfare amongst the Transformers. Eventually, one of the Primes' descendants, Sentinel Prime, gathered a small group of loyal followers, including Optimus and Megatron, and together, they scoured the depths of Cybertron for the cube. The AllSpark was discovered beneath the city of Simfur and unearthed, prompting an attack by Sentinel's most violent opponents, the Thetacons. During the battle, technical genius Wheeljack used a device to warp space and time, teleporting a sun from across the galaxy into Cybertronic space. Rather than sacrifice the sun as the legends claimed was required, however, Sentinel gambled that mere proximity to the star would be enough for the cube to re-energize itself... and he was correct. The AllSpark was revitalized, and new life flooded into Cybertron as hostilities came to an end in the face of the truth that Sentinel had been right all along. The Thetacons constructed a temple around the AllSpark, as a way of making amends for their aggression. Evidently, the Transformers declined to plumb the depths of the AllSpark's knowledge; it was said to contain the only recorded history of Cybertron, but to the Transformers, the AllSpark was the source of life, and that was all that mattered. Some time later, by which point leadership of Cybertron had shifted to an uneasy joint rulership between Optimus and Megatron, the Simfur Temple had come to be guarded by Bumblebee and Cliffjumper. Movie Prequel #1 Peace on Cybertron ended when the Fallen's sarcophagus was unearthed by an archaeological dig, causing the AllSpark to give off pulses, attracting the attention of a hostile alien species from the Eshems Nebula who attacked Cybertron. The Fallen began communicating with Megatron, and tempted him to seize the power of the AllSpark, leading him to go rogue with his own army, the Decepticons. Optimus, now dubbed Optimus Prime following the discovery that he was connected to the Dynasty of Primes, formed his own army of Autobots to counter Megatron. In the war that followed, Cybertron was decimated, and eventually Optimus was forced to capture the AllSpark to keep it out of enemy hands. Eventually, Prime made the decision to launch the AllSpark blindly into space to put it beyond Megatron's reach. At Optimus Prime's orders, Bumblebee and a group of Autobots served as decoys, drawing the Decepticons to Tyger Pax, far enough away from the artifact's true location to buy Prime the time needed to prepare the launch. Megatron witnessed the launch from afar, and immediately took off after the cube, pursuing it across the galaxy for thousands of years. Once launched into space, the AllSpark automatically sought out the location of a harvester, and made its way to Earth, where the Fallen had constructed one thousands of years beforehand. The cube landed in the region of the planet that would eventually become Nevada around 10,000 BC; Megatron successfully tracked the cube to Earth, but wound up crashing in the Arctic and freezing solid for hundreds of years, to be eventually discovered in 1897 by Captain Archibald Witwicky. Four years later, in 1902, the government operatives tasked to investigating this frozen "Mega-Man" discovered the AllSpark in the Colorado River. Metallurgist Lou Hoover and her husband Herbert were called in by the government to examine the cube, but it would take over a decade before Herbert was able to orchestrate the diversion of the river so the cube could be excavated. The excavation of the AllSpark took place in 1913, but was interrupted by the arrival of the Seeker Jetfire, who had been stranded on Earth thousands of years ago. Jetfire accidentally triggered a discharge of Energon from the cube which brought a collection of machines to life, and the Hoovers were forced to break open the floodgates and allow the river to "drown" the creatures and submerge the cube once more. Herbert subsequently ran for President of the United States and won, orchestrating the construction of the Hoover Dam in the area to serve as a new, more durable and permanent housing for the AllSpark. Irreplaceable Titan Magazines pre-movie comics While Bumblebee's team distracted Megatron, Optimus Prime himself had to press the fatal button that would launch the AllSpark into space. While he was struggling with the decision at the last moment, fearing the potential slow death he would be condemning Cybertron to if he carried through with his plans, an alarm alerted Prime to the attack of a drone that had been specifically sent to destroy him. Instructing his assistant Arctus to launch the AllSpark if he did not return in ten cycles, Prime headed out to battle the drone, but the fight only wound up carrying them back into the AllSpark's chamber. To destroy the drone, Prime transformed to his cometary protoform mode and smashed clean through it, rendering himself unconscious in the process. When Prime awoke, he looked up to see the AllSpark rocketing away into space. The AllSpark had not been cast blindly into the sea of stars, however: It had, in fact, been launched directly towards the Alkaris Anomaly, a wormhole that could potentially transport the cube to an infinite number of locations in the universe. Briefly delayed by an Autobot tractor beam, Megatron could not stop the cube from entering the wormhole, and instead chose to follow it into the anomaly. While the AllSpark was disgorged somewhere in the vicinity of the Sol system, to eventually crash on Earth, Megatron was deposited by the wormhole in some other, far off star system, leaving him to hunt for the Cube through the endless reaches of space. Later on, a space-travelling Ironhide would be captured by an alien craft—its inhabitants appeared to be immense entities that claimed the All Spark had been stolen from them, and did a psychic probe of Ironhide. They turned out to be "electrical ghosts", a digital imprint from another time kept alive by the photon-rich atmosphere; the ship was a derelict, salvaged by another (rather feeble) alien race that had been using these ghosts as a front. The ship contained a device attuned to AllSpark energy though, making it clear the original inhabitants did have some connection to the AllSpark... ''Transformers'' film Sector Seven agent Seymour Simmons explained that the AllSpark was found in 1913, 16 years after the N.B.E.-01 "Iceman" was found, though carbon dating tests indicated that Cube landed on Earth some twelve thousand years earlier. The glyphs on the Cube were similar to the ones on the Iceman, indicating a link between the two. In order to hide the cube's energy signature from other humans and, potentially, from other N.B.E.s, the President had the Hoover Dam built around it. The Iceman was also moved to the dam for further study. It was eventually determined that the Cube emitted a radiation which could bring mechanical devices to life. Without the AllSpark, Cybertron itself began to atrophy, becoming an uninhabitable world. The Autobots and Decepticons abandoned their planet and took to the stars, searching for the lost AllSpark, the Autobots hoping to use its power to restore their dead homeworld, the Decepticon seeking its power to animate the machines of other planets to build an army. Bumblebee succeeded in tracking the cube to Earth, and the rest of the Autobots arrived there in 2007, and allied themselves with Captain Witwicky's great-grandson, Sam Witwicky. Together, they traced the cube to its hiding place in the Hoover Dam, inadvertently revealing its location to the Decepticon spy Frenzy, who summoned the other Decepticons and deactivated the systems keeping Megatron in cryo-stasis, bringing him back online. To get the AllSpark to safety, Bumblebee interacted with the cube and somehow prompted it to collapse from an enormous monolith into an object less than half a meter across, and accordingly lesser in mass as well as volume. The AllSpark was quickly taken to nearby Mission City, where Sam was instructed to take it to the top of the highest building for evac. Stumbling as he ran, Sam fell and struck the AllSpark on the ground, causing it to release a wave of energon radiation which brought several nearby machines to life. Upon reaching the top of the building, Sam was confronted by Megatron, but refused to turn the cube over to him, and was sent toppling from the building. Optimus Prime came to his rescue, and during the battle that followed between Prime and Megatron, the Autobot leader told Sam to merge the AllSpark with his spark in order to destroy it. However, Sam instead merged it with Megatron's spark, destroying both the Decepticon leader and the AllSpark. Only a single fragment of the cube appeared to remain, which Prime plucked from Megatron's dead body. Without the AllSpark, the Autobots had no means to restore their homeworld, and so elected to remain on Earth. Prime sent a message to inform the surviving Autobots of their new found home. Titan Magazines post-movie comics Immediately after the end of the clash in Mission City, the battle's sole Decepticon survivor, Starscream, set upon the collection of machines that the All Spark had brought to life during the chaos. From each of them, he plucked the spark of life that the All Spark had granted them, which took the form of small red cubes like the All Spark itself. By placing them into the bodies of his fallen Decepticon comrades, Starscream reanimated them as a kind of robotic zombie and sent them against the recuperating Autobots. Ratchet was able to deduce what was powering the undead Decepticons, and instructed his allies to target the All Spark energy signatures in their bodies, thereby allowing them to destroy them again. The following events occur in a splinter timeline where Megatron won the battle of Mission City.After defeating Optimus Prime, Megatron killed Sam Witwicky and claimed the All Spark, bonding himself to it and gaining the ability to channel its power. The cube was installed at a base in Savannah, Georgia, where Megatron began using it to transform Earth into a new Cybertron. Megatron placed Optimus Prime in cryo-stasis, but Bumblebee and Mikaela Banes freed him, and the two leaders battled, with Megatron's ability to channel the energy from the All Spark allowing him to heal any wound Prime inflicted. Bumblebee saved the day when he hit Megatron with a nano-virus provided by Sector Seven that blocked the All Spark's energy, successfully killing him. At the same time as this fight went on, Ratchet and Ironhide penetrated the Georgia base, and Ratchet was forced to the All Spark in order to save the Earth. A fragment of the All Spark survived the explosion, which, due to the cube's very nature, could conceivably possess all the power of the original object. Fearing that Megatron's link to the All Spark could have corrupted it somehow, Optimus Prime assigned Ratchet as the shard's guardians, but Ratchet could not resists trying to use the shard to revive Jazz—who was reborn as an amoral villain, proving the fragment had been indeed corrupted. The Autobots were soon to discover that destroying the All Spark had not kept the Earth from danger: the planetary transformation process had reached the planet's core before it had been stopped, and the All Spark "infection" was now threatening to tear the planet apart. Simultaneously, on the dying Cybertron, Stockade and his small band of Decepticons sent out a signal into deep space in the hope of contacting any entity related to the All Spark, and drawing it to Cybertron so it could revive the planet. They succeeded; unfortunately, the entity they summoned was Unicron, the Anti-Life. After the Autobots helped stop Unicron, Stockade provided them with the Nucleon they need to negate the All Spark infection on Earth. Starscream discovered that Megatron still lived on in a form, having downloaded his consciousness into the module he had used to control the All Spark at the moment of his death. Starscream had absorbed this module into himself, and so wound up being "haunted" by Megatron, who cajoled and taunted him into placing the module and an All Spark fragment into Megatron's corpse, resurrecting him. IDW post-movie comics Following the Decepticons' defeat in Mission City, Starscream recovered the deactivated Frenzy from Hoover Dam in order to obtain the information the spy had amassed on the AllSpark from Sector Seven's database. He beamed this data to Cybertron before returning there himself, where it was used to constructed a huge replica AllSpark. Starscream sacrificed the lives of five Autobot prisoners of war to "jump-start" his new AllSpark, only to find that the construct simply... didn't work. Before Starscream could deduce the source of the problem, the Decepticons that had been following him turned on him for his failure, and the replica cube was destroyed by Arcee. A month after the events in Mission City, the Autobots went to a secret Sector Seven facility located in the Nevada desert to escort the remains of the deactivated Decepticons to their resting place in the Laurentian Abyss. When the AllSpark shard Prime had taken from Megatron's body pulsed with energy near the Decepticon leader's corpse, Optimus Prime feared the worst and handed it to Professor Vine for safekeeping. After the Autobots left, Agent Simmons convinced Vine to take the shard into their underground facility, since to keep it in the open would only attract Decepticons, though Vine had misgivings considering the stasis-locked Decepticon Wreckage was also in the same facility. Vine's fears were well-founded: as he and Simmons moved the shard into secure storage, its energy reactivated both the very angry Wreckage and Sector Seven's own L.M.-1 units. After the attack, the AllSpark fragment was retrieved from the rubble by Salani and returned it to Optimus Prime. Eventually, the Autobots and the American military entered into a formal alliance to defend Earth, and the AllSpark fragment was stored in a bunker under their base on the island of Diego Garcia. ''Revenge of the Fallen'' film In 2009, Decepticon spymaster Soundwave discovered that the surviving AllSpark fragment was being kept on Diego Garcia after hacking into a communication broadcast between NEST and General Morshower. Soundwave dispatched Ravage and Reedman to retrieve the fragment, and it was subsequently used by Scalpel to resurrect Megatron from the bottom of the Laurentian Abyss. However, unbeknownst to anyone, the shard in NEST's custody was not the only surviving piece of the AllSpark. When Sam Witwicky began packing for Princeton University, a sliver of the cube was revealed to have become embedded in his shirt during the battle of Mission City, and upon touching it, Sam's mind was flooded with Cyberglyphics. As The Fallen would go on to explain, the AllSpark cube itself was merely a vessel for the knowledge within, and Sam had absorbed that knowledge upon the cube's destruction, which was now released into his mind upon contact with its remains. Sam dropped the sliver in shock, and it burned its way through his bedroom floor, falling into the kitchen below where it released a wave of Energon that brought the Appliancebots to life. With this more immediate threat to deal with, Sam did not realize the full extent of what the AllSpark had done to his mind until his disastrous first day of class, during which he began uncontrollably babbling the specifics of the fantastic science of the Transformers to the shock and ridicule of his classmates and professor. He called upon Mikaela to bring the fragment to him, but no sooner had she arrived than Sam became targeted by the Decepticons, who desired the AllSpark knowledge in his brain to lead them to the hidden star harvester on Earth. Optimus Prime died saving Sam, and Sam, believing that the energy of the Matrix of Leadership could be used to resurrect Prime, sought out one of the Decepticon Seekers to translate the symbols he was seeing in hopes of finding a clue to its location. The Seeker they found was Jetfire, who was slumbering in the Smithsonian, and they used the AllSpark sliver to reactivate him. Although borderline senile, the ancient Seeker was able to translate the symbols Sam into a riddle that pointed the way to the Matrix's hiding place. Category:Objects